Charlotte was quite straightforward as to why she had done the thing; she had done it partly out of generous enthusiasm for a cause which she did not very well understand, but to which certain friends of hers had attached themselves with a blind and dogged obstinacy (two of those friends she had left in prison behind her); but more because she wished to supply an object lesson of what she was really like to the Prince of Schnapps-Wasser.
She insisted that he was to be told all about it. And the Queen was in despair.
"Tell him that you have been in jail like a common criminal for assaulting the police? I couldn't, it would break my heart! I should die of the shame of it."
"Very well," said Charlotte, "I will tell him myself, then; you can't prevent me doing that! No, I'm not going to be headstrong, or foolish, or obstinate, or any of the things you said I was: now I've made the exhibition of myself that I intended making, I'll be a lamb. If I like him enough, and if he likes me enough, I'll marry him. But I shall have to like him a great deal more than I do at present; and he will have to want me very much more than it's possible for him to do until he has seen me——"
"Oh, don't be so conceited, my dear!" said the Queen, her good-humor and confidence beginning to be restored as she watched the fair flushed face, and those queer attractive little gestures which made her daughter's charm so irresistible.
"Before anything will induce me to say 'yes,'" concluded Charlotte.
And then, as though that finished the matter, and as though her own naughty doings were of no further interest, she cried: "And now tell me about the bomb!" And the Queen, who still liked to dwell upon that episode of sights, sounds, and sensations, strangely mingled and triumphantly concluded by a popular ovation such as she had never met with in her life before, started off at once on a detailed narrative, corrected now and then by the King's more sober commentary, and aided by the eager questions of her daughter, who sat in close and fond contact with both of them, mopping her eyes alternately with her mother's handkerchief and her own.
"Oh! why wasn't I there?" she cried incautiously, when word came of the great popular reception crowning all.
"Ah! why weren't you?" inquired the King waggishly. And when he had made that little joke at her, Charlotte knew that all her naughty goings off and goings on were comfortably forgiven and done with.
"But you know, papa," she said later, when for the first time they were alone together, "I have found out quite a lot of things that you know nothing about: quite dreadful things! And they are going on behind your back, and women are being put into prison for it."